Melodrama lurks at the edges of this ambitious debut, occasionally crossing the line; still, it’s crisply written and never...
A son, keeping watch over his dying father, is tested by a grim secret.
Heshel Rosenheim, concentration camp survivor, lays dying in a South Florida nursing home. For Michael, his son, a hard vigil gets harder when he finds a box full of notebooks—24 of them—written in his father’s hand. He approaches them warily: “I did not want to know if he had lovers. I did not want to know if he took diuretics . . . or if he hit my mother (especially, God forbid, if she liked it).” Michael is a standup comic whose life has lately not had much of a funny side. He loves his wife, but she’s left him. He loves his son but can’t figure out how to be a father to him. His career is currently bottom of the bill, and now here are these mysterious notebooks. Is this a novel his father’s been writing? If so, can it possibly be autobiographical? Chilling thought, nauseating really, since in the first paragraph, Michael learns that Heinrich Mueller, protagonist, joined the SS in 1939 and two years later was posted to that most infamous of death camps, Majdonek. Michael begins to pursue a truth that he’s reluctant to find. His fading father switches from delusional to deliberately obscure, as if in lucid moments, he, too, regrets the existence of the notebooks. But because they do, Michael is forced to confront them. He learns how closely transgression, repentance and atonement are connected. And that sometimes forgiveness follows, sometimes not.
Melodrama lurks at the edges of this ambitious debut, occasionally crossing the line; still, it’s crisply written and never less than engaging.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6311-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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